Early start time for debate means that many people in the West will not be able to see it allBack to video

And 4 p.m. in Vancouver, Victoria and Whitehorse.

Which means in three provinces and two territories (and parts of Nunavut, which use, variously, eastern, central and mountain time) people won’t even be off work yet, let alone at home in front of their televisions, having walked the dog, made some dinner and grabbed a beer from the fridge.

Which means that in three provinces and two territories, many, many people will likely not even get to see the entire debate, and it’s already a truncated timeline where even a few minutes delay here and there mean something is going to get missed.

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This is the only time in the entire election campaign where Trudeau, Andrew Scheer, Maxime Bernier, Jagmeet Singh, Elizabeth May and Yves-François Blanchet will share a stage and present their visions for the future of Canada in English.

And this is after Quebec gets two French-language debates.

That may or may not be fair, but what certainly isn’t fair is that British Columbia, basically, gets zero debates and Alberta gets, what, half a debate?

Maybe Manitoba gets a full debate — after all, for them, it starts at 6, which is a reasonable hour to get to your TV set.

This is also somewhat more than geographic unfairness, because this will be translated into several Indigenous languages and other minority languages, but, given the time zone issues, is going to be especially difficult for those communities to actually watch.

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But the single starkest example of the problematic nature of the debate timing is that there’s an entire section of the debate on Indigenous issues.

The relationship between Alberta and British Columbia over energy production and Indigenous opposition to the Trans Mountain Pipeline and Indigenous support of the emergency industry in Alberta, has been the story of the past couple years for the westernmost chunk of the country.

And yet these are the two parts of the country least likely to be able to watch the debates live — and that’s not even accounting for the fact that there are significant percentages of the northern population who are Indigenous who are also entrapped by this time zone issue.

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And yes, obviously, you can use a PVR — if you own one, of course — to tape the debate and indeed probably watch the whole thing later.

But if you don’t watch live, you’re not going to be getting the same insight and commentary from pundits and news organizations via social media, and indeed, the various panels of spin doctors and journalists who will dissemble the debate afterwards. There is some value to this, surely.

And that doesn’t even account for the other organizational mess that’s been made here, namely, that four of the five moderators work in Ontario.

It’s hard to escape the sense that this is a raw deal for everyone west of Thunder Bay

It is by no means an impeachment of their professional credentials to ask whether or not the experience of living outside of Ontario might inform their lines of inquiry. As but one example, one of the sections of debate will be titled “affordability,” which, while certainly a fair issue, is a very, very different thing in Toronto or Vancouver than it is in Saskatoon.

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And that may or may not even include questions about the economy, which surely are the issues about which voters are most concerned in Alberta, but also in the Maritimes.

All of which is to say, these are perhaps good problems for a nation to have: when the biggest issue on a leadership debate night is the time zone, things sure are going well.

But taken in sum, it’s hard to escape the sense that this is a raw deal for everyone west of Thunder Bay, who are going to have a harder time making a ballot box choice, unless they put in some serious effort to play catch-up in the coming days.

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